Contributors

Downloading an Image

The operating system that will be installed onto the SD card must be downloaded from the Internet. This will usually be a zip file that then extracts to a file of type .img an image file. Whatever image file you download, the actual installation process is the same.

Choose your Operating System

There are a bewildering number of operating systems that you can install on your Raspberry Pi. If you are a beginner, you'll probably want to stick with one of the Linux distributions.

Choose your Distribution

Having decided you want to install Linux, that is not the end of the story. You now have to decide which distribution or 'distro' of Linux you want to install. Being an Open Source operating system, anyone can take one of the existing distributions an add things to it or configure it in a certain way before packaging it up as another distribution option for anyone to use. This is how the most common Raspberry Pi distribution, 'Raspbian', came into existence. The existing 'Debian' distribution was configured and kitted out with useful things like IDLE (a python-programming language development editor) and Scratch (a learn-to-program gaming system) to make it suitable for the Pi.

All of the Adafruit tutorials (and nearly every other tutorial online) will work with Raspbian, and nearly every Pi out there runs it.

Additionally, Adafruit offers a growing set of tools for working with Raspbian installations, including the Adafruit Raspberry Pi Finder, a GUI for configuring your Pi over the network, and Occidentalis, a collection of utilities for hardware support and hacking.

Previous versions of Occidentalis were built as standalone images, but we've since turned it into a set of packages for Raspbian.

(Incidentally, the name Occidentalis comes from the Latin name for the raspberry, Rubus Occidentalis.)

Extract the Image File

Whatever distribution you're installing, you'll probably have a zip file that looks something like one of these:

OUT OF STOCK NOTIFICATION

YOUR NAME

YOUR EMAIL

You have been successfully subscribed to the Notification List for this product and will therefore receive an e-mail from us when it is back in stock!

For security reasons, an e-mail has been sent to you acknowledging your subscription. Please remember that this subscription will not result in you receiving any e-mail from us about anything other than the restocking of this item.

If, for any reason, you would like to unsubscribe from the Notification List for this product you will find details of how to do so in the e-mail that has just been sent to you!